Articles

The air quality in China is bad enough you should take notice. It’s not bad enough you should avoid visiting and taking a good look at differences between China’s Tiger Moms and America’s Wall Street tycoons.

What jobs will tomorrow’s children have? I informally surveyed a number of teens and adults from around the world, and responses told the same fearful story. Technology, robots and artificial intelligence will take jobs. Educators plan for science fiction futures.

If you haven’t been to China recently, you haven’t seen its sparkling streets. After a long stint in Shanghai, I recently visited Suzhou and Hong Kong. Suzhou is a 20-minute high speed rail ride from central Shanghai. No potholes. No garbage. No oil stains. I don’t remember even seeing any gum spots. For a city of 10 million, Suzhou is new, clean and spotless, just like most of Shanghai.

On opening day every year, school heads spend more time recounting success stories than charting statistical successes. Data retreats, all the rage a decade ago, have disappeared from the landscape. Why despite being flush with data do school leaders prefer to tell stories to open the year?

Paris has some great schools. An American friend of mine lives near the Bastille with her French husband and two primary school-aged kids. She likes her kids’ school. But she still wants to move her family back to the US when they get to high school.

Public and private sector leadership development remains divided, especially in formal degree programs. Creating transformed schools necessitates bridging the bifurcation. An immediate solution is signing up more would-be education leaders to great MBA programs.

The two greatest impediments to transforming education come from the public. Public opinion needs to change in two areas to open the floodgates and radically improve schooling for children. The public needs to embrace the idea that the schools of the future will not look like the schools of the past, and the economics of education need to escape partisan politics.

School leaders in the next few years are going to face seismic disruptions in every aspect of teaching and learning. Before accepting a leadership position, the mindful leader needs to gauge the likelihood the school will absorb disruptions or be permanently disrupted by technological change.

Team success is organizational success. Capacity to build and deploy effective teams has repeatedly been shown to be more important than individual skill, procedural clarity or even well-defined performance targets in improving organizational outcomes.

Public education in the United States resists change. That schools look much now as they did in the 1950s and the entrenched interests that resist change is old news. The story less often told and much more provocative is how gatekeeping to school heads hinders change.